Posts tagged ‘spam’

In the never-ending fight against spam, we all (hopefully) have some sort of filtering on our inboxes. In the attempt to let less and less spam through, there are the inevitable casualties called “false positives” — legitimate e-mail that our filters treat as spam. One way to help minimize those false positives is called “whitelisting”. Any e-mail that comes from a whitelisted address will be let through without any further checks. This helps assure that important e-mails make it through, and many newsletters that you can subscribe to will tell you the address that the mailings will come from, and suggest that you whitelist that address.

Now, many people often send themselves a copy of important e-mails that they send to others, so they have their own copy in their inbox. And, to prevent such e-mails from possibly hitting their spam traps, they whitelist their own address. While this sounds like a good idea on the surface, it’s actually a bad idea in today’s spam-filled era.